Northern Exposure: How My Bloody Valentine Broke The Slasher Mold
By the early 1980s, the slasher genre had already established itself as a cultural force and a box office draw, with genre conventions established enough for any gorehound to expect them when they headed into the theater. Doomed youths drink and screw and expire one-by-one as a mysterious killer works through a playbook of exciting new configurations for the adolescent body, culminating in a final girl who manages to outlive her friends through a combination of moxie and good cardio. Paramount Pictures was hoping for some of that sweet, sweet slasher buzz to carry over to their newest release in 1981: My Bloody Valentine, a movie that did decently at the box office, but was considered an embarrassing flop by Paramount for failing to produce the torrential windfall of Friday The 13th the year before.
Audiences were in the mood for slashers with more summery atmospheres, and critics weren’t particularly keen, either—Siskel and Ebert ragged on it for not being as stylish or inventive as Halloween, the rare slasher the two actually enjoyed. Everyone else promptly shelved it once the next slasher came down the pike (Friday The 13th Part 2: Potato Sack Vengeance.) But the people were wrong about this chilly oddball of a film, which brought some fascinating new dynamics and themes to the table that no other slashers had the guts to explore as each tried furiously to recreate the magical formula that made audiences lose their minds at Camp Crystal Lake.
The plot setup is slasher hyper concentrate : The past comes back to bite a sleepy town in its sleepy ass as a masked assailant wreaks vengeance on the anniversary of a local tragedy. But it’s the way it fills in those blanks that sets it apart as a subversive gem of the genre. The same formula audiences knew to expect, the same plot beats and hallmarks of the genre, are new and surprising when applied to a cast of characters outside of middle-class teenage suburbia.
The audience is treated to a titillating shower scene at the top of the film as male workers wash the soot off their hairy adult bodies after a long day shoveling coal in the dark mines of the Canadian town of Valentine Bluffs. The energy somehow remains high—working a beat as brutal as coal-mining doesn’t dampen the charged, dick-swinging energy of the group as they grin and shove each other and yell “yee-haw” about which girls they plan to hook up with later on. Sitting alongside these good vibes is their conversation heading into the shower room: Methane buildup in the mine is going to blow their big hairy adult bodies apart one of these days, and they chuckle and slap each other’s shoulders about it like they each have a hot date with Death herself.
They’re extremely aware of the volatility of their vocation as both an ongoing concern and as the cause of a tragedy twenty years prior, in which two supervisors left for a Valentine’s Day Dance without checking the methane levels, causing an explosion that trapped a miner named Harry Warden with five of his coworkers, all of whom he was forced to cannibalize before being rescued. Harry, of course, processed this event by ripping his negligent bosses’ hearts out and sticking them in little boxes and threatening to do even more themed murders if the town ever dared hold another Valentine’s Day Dance. But the hot-blooded miners of Valentine Bluffs will not be denied. They decide not just to have the dance, but to have it in the same goddamned coal mine where Harry Warden was driven to homicidal, holiday-specific madness. Yee-haw.
Prior to the appearance of blade-wielding menaces in other slashers, the youth of Haddonfield and Crystal Lake are unacquainted with death, having yet to even emerge into adulthood as a prerequisite to eventual mortality. (Of course, once adulthood is reached in Haddonfield, you stave off the specter of death by attending what must be the wildest all-night sex party in the Chicagoland area while your kids get massacred elsewhere. Whatever. It’s not your problem.) Tragedies may have befallen the community once upon a time, but that was too long ago for anyone but crusty townies to know about, and the kids are too busy hooking up and smoking weed to be down in a library basement digging up microfiche. Death is not yet woven into the fabric of their worlds, and it’s all the more jarring when an adult with a knife decides to change that.
Valentine Bluffs has no such barriers, and not only are its twenty somethings perfectly familiar with the legend of Harry Warden, they don’t have time to be worried about it—they work in the same dark and dangerous coal mine as he did, and they share gallows laughs about the likelihood of the same fate crashing down on them, never mind the threat of Harry making good on his promise to come back for more. They’re as preoccupied with sex and partying as any bushy-tailed suburban teen, but the harshness of their daily lives down in the mines adds an urgency unavailable to a kid in Haddonfield with nothing better to do anyway.
Stacked up against more lighthearted holiday slashers with younger casts and more raucous soundtracks (and how could “The Ballad of Harry Warden” ever hope to compete with that bangin’ title track from New Year’s Evil, after all), it’s unsurprising that My Bloody Valentine didn’t get a dozen sequels, complete with Harry Warden terrorizing an ore-mining operation in deep space. But it makes me long to see how 80s horror might have been different if My Bloody Valentine had caught the big cog on a mainstream level and more screenwriters had applied the slasher formula to more diverse adult milieus. Summer camp loses its charm when you never get to grow up and leave.